Hasta La Ideas

Most people already familiar with boil-in-bag cooking—where you plop a bag of frozen or pre-cooked food into a pot of boiling water—will easily grasp the concept of Sous-vide. Literally translated in French, the term means “under vacuum,” and the method refines the simple concept by slowly cooking seasoned, vacuum-sealed foods in warm water at very precise temperatures. Therein lies the art and science of sous-vide; obtaining and controlling the temperature of a water bath for long periods of time (up until now) required much larger and much more expensive professional equipment. Sure, you can try this at home with basic tools, but it’s very challenging to achieve a degree-specific temperature and to hold it for hours at a time with make-shift equipment.

The invention of sous-vide cooking, credited to Chef Georges Pralus, dates to 1974 when, as the chef of Restaurant Troisgros in Rouanne, France, Pralus discovered that cooking fois gras sous-vide preserved its color and texture. His efforts, along with those of Bruno Goussault, created the standards for the temperatures and times required to cook various foods sous-vide, and the two have spent much of their careers since educating chefs around the world about the technique.

Benefits of sous-vide are simple and rather anticlimactic. Cooking slow at optimally low temperatures ensures that it never gets overcooked. Once the food reaches the temperature of the water, it can remain in the waterbath without overcooking. The slowness creates fully cooked food at sometimes surprising textures. Food cooks only in its own juices, retaining nutrients and enhancing both natural flavors and the intensity of any added seasonings.

The SousVide Supreme, the first sous vide cooking appliance marketed for home use, can also certainly be used on a small scale in a professional kitchen. Testing one of the devices for the past week has impressed us with how easy it is to use and how tasty our test meals have been. Cooking with the machine is as simple as filling it with water and setting the temperature (and timer if you need it). Put the pouches in the water. Wait until done. To clean up, empty out the water and dry.

We cooked eggs multiple ways, steak, Branzino and Salmon. Creating creamy soft boiled eggs took 60 minutes at 146°. (Whole eggs cook in the machine without vacuum sealing.) Scrambled eggs that had a custard-like texture required 25 minutes at 167° and a few squeezes along the way to break up the eggs as they firmed. The salmon cooked to perfection in 40 minutes, the steak took two hours at 140°, resulting in a perfectly cooked medium rare, unbelievably tender piece of meat. The best meal was our whole Branzino, which we seasoned with lemongrass, ginger, garlic and coconut milk. (See the photo below.)

While sous-vide eliminates the need to stir or monitor meals-in-the-making (with eggs as an exception to the time rule, as their three-part protein structure requires exact timing to achieve desired results), setting the temperature to the precisely accurate degree is important. All temps are kept below boiling, but the difference of a few degrees can affect the overall outcome. Though written for the professional kitchen, Chef Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure cookbook offers great insight on how to achieve the best results for each type of food. We also found the recipes on the SousVide Supreme site to offer some guidance, and multiple blogs cater to sous-vide enthusiasts. (We recommend SousVideCooking.org.)

For amateur and experienced home cooks alike, the SousVide Supreme makes an awesome tool for experimentation and rounding out your kitchen tricks. It sells online and at Sur la Table for $450.

A great collective of designers/illustrators based out of Norway.

We’ve posted about Oh Yeah Studio in the past, apparently they’ve recently partnered with these guys to launch a new site. Looks great, take a second to peruse.

The artist in a 2001 production still from Art:21

French-born artist Louise Bourgeois, whose career ran parallel to avant-garde movements ranging from Surrealism to Post-Minimalism, died of a heart attack yesterday in New York City. She was 98. Best known for her emotionally-charged sculptures in wood, marble, metal, plaster, and latex, Bourgeois leaves behind a diverse body of work that includes drawings, paintings, and “Cells,” the haunting room-sized installations that she assembled throughout the 1990s. Her parents, who repaired and sold tapestries for a living, unwittingly demonstrated to her that artists could be useful—in ways that would come to resonate throughout her work. “If you look at the tapestries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are genitals everywhere. And the American puritanical attitude absolutely forbid that,” Bourgeois told Ingrid Sischy in a 1997 interview for Interview. “So one of my mother’s duties was to cut them out and put a bunch of flowers there, so it would not offend the moralities of the collectors.” She had no interest in fitting in with the movement of the moment, including Surrealism. “Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy,” said Bourgeois, whose profoundly personal work put her in a class by herself. “I am a lonely runner, but I am a long-distance runner.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

pimg alt=”wrongstore6b.jpg” src=”http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/wrongstore6b.jpg” width=”468″ height=”328″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” /br /
emTobias Wong, right, celebrating outside The Wrong Store in 2007/em/p

pThe design world lost a dear friend early Sunday morning with the passing of D. Tobias Wong, whose wit and daring will be terribly missed, and whose design provocations provided a consistent touchpoint throughout much of the last decade./p

pI remember meeting Tobi more than a decade ago on the corner of Prince and Mercer in SoHo, an eager graduate from Cooper Union set up behind a stool adorned with a corrugated box on top, filled with his now famous vials of a href=”http://www.brokenoff.com/silver.html”silver leaf capsules/a amidst assorted other design gestures. We chatted for just a few minutes that afternoon, and I remember walking away with a particular delight, sure that we would be seeing a lot more of Tobi’s work in the years to come. /p

pFavorites were his Andy Warhol print wrapping caper at TROY for the holidays, where customers could have their purchase wrapped in an actual Andy Warhol screenprint for an additional $5000 (“…we got very close with one customer,” Tobi recounted when it was all done); The Wrong Store, when he never broke character when asked what the hours of the store were #151;I was behind on my coverage and needed to be sure the place would be open when I arrived (it emnever/em opened, of course); the Killer Diamond Ring; and his storied a href=” http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/events/core77_owns_up_to_the_great_tobias_wong_switch_74330.asp”stunt/a at Core77’s Offsite event, a href=” http://www.core77.com/offsite/”Design Wit and the Creative Act/a, moderated by Ze Frank. Here, Tobi elected to have a stand-in for himself on the panel and for the QA session#151;the skillful Rama Chorpash#151;with whom Tobi rehearsed tirelessly to prepare both the a href=” http://www.core77.com/blog/broadcasts/core77_broadcasts_tobias_wong_at_core77_offsite_nyc_8581.asp”presentation/a (as Tobi would have given it), as well as the panel discussion talking points. Tobi sat in the audience, inconspicuous, taking it all in with a smile on his face. Even some of the panelists didn’t get the decoy (Tobi’s face hasn’t been design-star plastered in the media), and one attendee drove down from Toronto to meet his idol (we arranged a secret#151;and genuine#151;get-together during the cocktail hour). /p

pWell, there are too many great pieces of work to mention, but we also like this remark from a short a href=”http://www.core77.com/reactor/tobi_wong.html”interview with Core77/a back in 2002: “Leaving room for meaning is a cheap cop-out#151;the best designers/artists have always been focused on what and how they want to be read. Leaving room for meaning is for those not so confident with their ideas.” Nice./p

pAric Chen has written a moving release, with a beautiful summation of Tobi’s career:/p

blockquoteThrough his work, Wong helped bring forth much of what is now taken for granted in contemporary culture. Influenced by Dada and, especially, Fluxus, he questioned authorship through appropriation; held a mirror to our desires and absurdities; upended the hierarchy between design and art, and the precious and the banal; and helped redefine collaboration and curation as creative practices. Working within what he termed a “paraconceptual” framework, Wong prompted a reevaluation of everything we thought we knew about design: its production, its psychological resonance, its aesthetic criteria, its means of distribution, its attachment to provenance, its contextualization and its manner of presentation. Wong was a keen observer, an original mind, a brilliant prankster, and an unerring friend./blockquote

pTobi Wong’s work was widely exhibited, including at MoMA, Cooper-Hewitt, Colette, Prada, and more, and he was named Young Designer of the Year by Wallpaper* magazine (2004) as well as the Brooklyn Museum of Art (2006)./p

pCore77 would like to extend our heartfelt condolences to Tobi’s family and to Tim Dubitsky. Tobias Wong was a bright spot for us all, and his work will continue to inspire countless designers, artists, students and friends. He left us too soon, at 35 years of age./pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/we_will_miss_you_tobias_wong_16660.asp”(more…)/a
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